Clearly attempting to create in photography the type of genre scene he admired in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and its early-nineteenth-century French revival, the wealthy baron and gentleman farmer Humbert de Molard posed his wife, daughter, caretaker, and workers in tableaux of rural life at his château at Argentelle, in Normandy. Among the medium's pioneers in France, having taken up photography in 1843, Humbert de Molard exhibited this triptych at the 1856 Brussels Photographic Exposition as proof that he had made fast exposures and permanent prints even in 1850, when few practiced the art of photography on paper.